Disaster recovery for computers is a means, not an end to itself

January 20, 2013

When you draw up disaster recovery plans for your organization's
computers, there is something very important to remember: the
ultimate goal of a DR plan for computers is to help the organization
to keep working in the face of a disaster. On the one hand, this
sounds obvious. On the other hand, there is a huge difference
between allowing the organization's computers to keep working after
a disaster and allowing the organization to keep working after a
disaster. The difference is that there are plenty of other things that
your organization may (also) need in order to keep functioning.

(Of course there are organizations where computing is the most important
thing about them and is basically the only thing that they need.)

How this matters is that in the broad view, there is no point in the
organization's computers being back if the organization is not otherwise
functioning. There is especially no point in spending money (or
preallocating resources) to
make computing survive when the organization doesn't. Doing so is the
equivalent of planning to carefully construct and paint a single wall of
a house all by itself, without the rest of the house. It's a very nice
wall, very well constructed, you've thought of all of the contingencies
in building it, but it has no point. All your planning effort is
wasted effort.

(It's easy to overlook this if your job is to care very, very much about
that one wall.)

Or in short, computing disaster recovery is just one component of
overall disaster recovery. It is often not complete by itself.

One consequence of this is that if the organization doesn't or can't
have a disaster recovery plan for the other things that it needs to
function, a computing DR plan may be more or less pointless. Or at
least you don't need a comprehensive DR plan; all you need is a DR plan
that covers the contingencies where the only important thing that the
organization has lost is the computers. In other words, there may well
be some risks that are not worth mitigating in your computer DR plan
because the risk would also destroy other things that the organization
needs to function and there are no plans for how to recover from them.

(Again, disaster preparation is different from disaster recovery plans.
You can be prepared to (eventually) recover from a building going up in
flames without having a specific plan for it.)

On the other hand there are some organizations where the only thing
that the organization really needs to keep going is its computers and
maybe some people to answer the email. In these organizations, computing
DR is organizational DR and it may well make sense to pay a lot of
attention to a lot of risks and to try to mitigate them. Understanding
what sort of organization you're in and what the organization's crucial
resources actually are is a big part of good, sensible DR planning.

(The corollary of this is that there are no one size fits all answers
for what risks you should consider in computing DR planning.)